Get satisfied.
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“A bull contents himself with one meadow, and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other living creatures.”
— Seneca
“If only we could abandon the chimerical pursuit of ‘excellence’ or ‘total quality’ we could focus our energies on creating systems of welfare and governance which were ‘good enough’ – something we are presently far from achieving, either in Britain or elsewhere.”
— Paul Hoggett
I was sitting in a pub in Brixton, many years ago, with an old friend. He was a close friend, the kind of close where, as a young adult, you can still really get on each other’s nerves because you haven’t matured enough to accept each other’s differences; so, like bickering siblings, we’d get annoyed at petty things.
So there we were, having arranged to meet for a drink with a few other close friends. In a typically London way, it had taken a few weeks to arrange this gathering because of, you know, the workaholic, auto-exploitative culture we lived in.
We were having a good time - a great time, actually - in our favourite pub. The conversation began flowing immediately we arrived, there was laughter and bonhomie. And then, with about a quarter of his first beer left, my old pal Phil said, “So where are we off to next?”.
This, to me, was typical Phil, always keen to find the next great thing, one eye always on the possibility of something better, somewhere else. But I was enjoying where we were; it had everything we wanted, we were comfortable and enjoying ourselves. So I started a row. Which was typical of me in those days, I suppose.
The row boiled down to this. For Phil, the world’s greatest party, the best night of our lives, was always just around the corner - or had the potential to be.
For me, I was not interested in pursuing something ‘better’ because we were all having a great time where we were, so why not enjoy the good times we were having now rather than walking the cold streets to another bar?
Neither of us was wrong. We just placed a different value on what a ‘good’ night out was, and more importantly, we had quite different mindsets about decision-making.
It was not long after this that I came across the work of the behavioural psychologist, Barry Schwartz, and his explorations of what he calls the paradox of choice (he wrote a book with the same name). Schwartz’s thesis is broadly that in modern life, we have more choice than ever, but more choice often makes us less happy than having fewer choices.
In describing how we make choices, he coined the terms Maximiser and Satisficer as two fundamentally different ways of deciding on a course of action.
In making a choice, a satisficer will have a certain set of minimum criteria for what they are looking for. Once these criteria are met, the satisficer will stop searching.
A maximiser, on the other hand, will keep searching even when these minimum conditions have been met. They are seeking the optimal choice so they want to explore more options, or even as many options as possible.
A simple example might be going to a food market when you’re hungry. A satisficer will see something they like, say pizza, and buy it. A maximiser will see pizza and think “I like pizza and I’d eat it but I’m going see what else there is,” and continue browsing the market.
There’s an important point here - as individuals, we’re not always one or the other, whether we are maximising or satisficing is highly context dependent. There’s another important point, but I’m saving that for later.
As I read about this framework, that row about where to have a beer in Brixton suddenly made sense. When it came to a casual night out with friends, Phil was more of a maximiser, and I was more of a satisficer.
This mental model is one of the few that I’ve continually useful in making sense of my own decisions, whether big or small, and in making sense of the people, organisations and cultures I engage with. At the heart of Schwartz’s work is not binary decision-making styles, but a more layered understanding of how we perceive value, effort and risk in everyday life.
This is a pervasive challenge, one where we confuse the potential value of something and therefore how much effort we should put into it. This, in turn, means we make choices that lead to less desired outcomes: less happy, less effective, less peaceful, more expensive, less efficient, and so on.
Or put another way, some things are worth perfecting or optimising. Most things are not. We confuse these two categories an awful lot.
A few examples might help here. As a consultant in ‘Big Consulting’, I spent a frightening amount of my life creating PowerPoint presentations, an amount of time so great that I might actually regret it on my deathbed. The reason I spent so much time doing this is the extraordinary value placed on these documents by consulting firms and by their clients.
What is the point of a presentation? To convey a message. That’s it. It might include lots of data, research and reasoning, but ultimately the purpose is to tell an audience something using different forms of information. Yet the amount of time and effort put into these was incredible - at times, we had entire teams of us feverishly together a 100+ pages document as an output for a client, like members of a cult devotedly cleaning and arranging a gravel path.
The reason for the size and complexity of these documents was not because that was needed to convey the message but to signal value or to justify cost. One consulting partner introduced me to the notion of the “thump test”, by which he meant that the heavier the document, the bigger thump it would make on a client’s desk, and therefore the more significant it would feel to the client, making them less likely to question the enormous fees they were paying. I’m not making this shit up.
Even as a junior consultant, I questioned (sometimes foolishly) the cottage industry around presentations. I wondered out loud whether anyone actually read the whole thing and then gradually realised that probably no one did - both client and consultancy were engaged in an act of illusion over value, one that was actually wasting huge amounts of time and money, but made them feel better about their relationship. In other words, they were unconsciously agreeing to maximise.
This was put into sharp relief on the rare occasions I heard a query from a client on whether such a lengthy document was needed and what the gist of what we were trying to say was (at this point, with reddened faces, we’d sheepishly direct them to the 6-page executive summary). Having seen through the illusion, what these rare individuals were saying was ‘Couldn’t you have satisficed instead?’.
This works well for consulting firms in the short-term. Longer-term? Maybe not - consider what else could be done with all the time spent by smart people who are making sure boxes and bullet points are correctly aligned. It’s not the only reason I left consulting, but it’s part of it.
There is a similar dynamic at play with organisations and their supposed desire for innovation. They state clearly and boldly that they want to be more innovative and creative, often investing great sums of money in this endeavour, yet they rarely look at how their current culture strangles innovation at birth.
Why? Because most for-profit organisations, particularly mid-sized or large ones, often have a culture that punishes failure, and more relevant here, seek perfection (or incredibly high standards) in everything they do - even though at some level, everyone knows this is impossible (side note: this is a contributor to stress and burnout).
Rare is the organisation that regularly satisfices in certain areas, knowing that ‘good enough’ is good enough. And all of this is the opposite of the culture needed for innovation and creativity.
Ironically, large organisations have a piece of corporate-speak that names this: analysis-paralysis. Too much time spent analysing, reviewing, and pontificating, rather than actually taking meaningful action.
In the short-term, maximising can look more cost-effective as it is more focussed on a profitable return by building a sellable version straight away - and then selling it. But in the long-run, it is products and services that have been satisficers first, before being maximised, that create lasting value.
Where else do we maximise? Modern dating feels like an obvious one here. Roughly 41% of young adults are not in relationships (for young men, this is 51%), a figure that has increased over the last few decades.
At least part of this trend is believed to be due to how young people date, more specifically, the impact of dating apps, which create a dynamic of unequal and seemingly infinite choice.
What this encourages, mediated by data and algorithms, is the artificial notion of a perfect partner, and a reluctance to commit to anyone who appears to be anything less than this ideal. Dating in real life, meanwhile, involves more satisficing, mainly because we pay attention to how we feel around someone, and this is not something that arises from scanning someone’s carefully selected profile pics and their key measurements.
In real life, we can be surprised by who we find ourselves drawn to, which counters the ‘optimisation’ that is encouraged by an algorithm where the possibility of a sexier, more perfect future partner is nothing more than a swipe away. In reality, we know that relationships are never perfect and require ongoing work; what is more important is knowing that we’ve met someone who satisfies some basic yet fundamental needs - like shared values.
Change in our personal lives is often subject to the same decision-making. What I’ve noticed in my own journey as an adult and in my clients is how easily making change can be prohibited by the belief that the thing we want to do must be perfect, or we must be perfect at it.
For example, coaching clients often tell me there is something they have always wanted to do, something like public speaking or learning how to play guitar. Despite the deep desire they express for performing these activities, at some point, they are usually struck by an inertia stemming from this thought: ‘I’m going to be an amateur at this when I first do it, and I want to be a professional at it, so I’m not even going to start. Maybe there’s something else, or maybe I’ll be ready in the future’.
Thus, maximising has killed, at least temporarily, the possibility of trying something new and potentially life-changing.
It is easy to sit and contemplate what perfection would look like. So easy in fact that you continue sitting and never actually do anything. Perfect remains a fantasy, jam tomorrow, there’s always jam tomorrow.
So here’s the other important thing about maximisers and satisficers that I was holding back. On average, maximisers make choices that lead to better or more optimal outcomes than satisficers - but they also enjoy the process far less.
That’s worth noting - think about the people who invest incredible amounts of time and energy in making Christmas fabulous, but are stressed and miserable throughout the whole thing.
I ask again, what is really worth maximising? Will the extra five hours you spend searching for your holiday accommodation really translate to a better time?
Is walking around the block to check out the other cafes worth the difference it will make to your coffee? Given how limited your time is, how much effort should you put into deciding what you’ll wear each morning versus what it will add to your life?
When I think about what society needs right now, which is where all this musing started, it seems to me we need more satisficers. There’s a little too much waiting until the conditions are just right, or until we’ve figured out the perfect course of action, or until we have all the answers and resources in place.
Just start. You don’t have time, and we don’t have time, for this paralysis by perfection. When I started running men’s groups, I had some training as a coach and a facilitator, but not the depth required to perfectly prepare me for it. Now, five years and 17 groups later, I’m in a different place, with deep skills and experience that could only be gained by actually bringing men together and starting meaningful conversations.
And that’s the thing. Just start. Be aware of the risks, of course, don’t go around calling yourself a therapist or a heart surgeon without the right training and preparation.
But start, and sooner than you think. Start when you’re good enough, not perfect - which for most people, is much sooner than they think.
There is plenty of good and important work that needs to be done out there. Don’t wait for someone else to do it, and don’t wait until you’re perfectly ready.
I’m taking on two new coaching clients this year. I work with people looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.
“The more you desire, the more you spend; the more you hoard, the greater your loss. Know contentment right where you are and suffer no disgrace; know when to stop so you suffer no harm and endure long.”
— Lao Tzu
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.